It is the start of Holy Week. Two Thousand years ago, Christ entered Jerusalem on his way to Calvary.

As we start the week, our nation finds itself in an interesting position. Unlike our cousins in Europe, we remain a church going nation with a majority who believe in God, or at least claim to. At the same time, it has become trendy to demagogue the Church.

ABC runs a show called “Good Christian Bitches” and the President of the United States declares war on faith trying to force secular beliefs into sectarian Christian faith.

We are still a mostly religious nation, but it has become cool to reject Christ or even to come out as an atheist. Atheists are routinely feted by our celebrity culture, appear on news shows mouthing off on the topics of the day, and are heralded as courageous for rejecting several thousand years of considered thought while mocking that considered thought as mythology.

The stupid are always the wise in this world.

Let’s start this week with one particular thought that so many of the so called wise will reject as stupid, but which is absolute fact.

Every man, woman, and child in this world has a god. Even atheists have gods. It may not be the actual risen Lord, but everyone has a god.

People need gods. It may be a job. It may be a drug. It may be family. It may be a hobby. Each person’s god may be different and it may even be yourself. But everyone puts their faith in something and it becomes their god whether they believe it or not.

In this day and age, many secularists have converted creation itself into their god and they worship God’s creation in place of God himself.

Where do you give your time, your talent, and your treasure? Where is your focus?

Where ever that might be, it most likely is your god.

This week, fix your focus, your time, your talent, and your treasure on Calvary. There the real God was nailed to a cross against his will, was crucified, died, and was buried. What some ridicule and mock as outmoded myth set off, three days later, the most significant event all of human history* — one that shaped the world in a way no other before or after could.

As you start your Monday and focus on work, family, friends, holidays, and travel, keep some perspective about you. There are bigger things at work around us and one bigger than all of us at work for us.

Both sides do it!! Unless we take just a moment to differentiate between hobbies, jobs, family, a drug, even, & REAL GOD whose considerable mythology wants Erick & his friends to shove their faith & not-really-that-moral codes down everyone else's throats once they've internalized them.

Big difference between working for breathable air, drinkable water & livable temperatures & sticking your head in the sand because humans aren't as powerful as The Big Fucking Killer In The Sky of Erickson's imagination. Do he & Inhofe also believe (W/ all their hearts!!) that humans couldn't destroy most life on the planet w/ atomic weapons? Because if they believed that, then all of the money they've directed at the military-industrial-Congressional complex was pretty much wasted. Beliefs are very strange things.

And Erick Erickson is a very stupid person.*NOT ARROGANT AT ALL. SHUT UP!

“I think it’s two things,” Friedman said. “I think it is the fact that in my view the Republican Party is no longer a conservative party. It’s become a radical party on a lot of these key issues. That’s number one. And number two, I just came back from New Zealand, OK. You have people living in the outback of Australia who would look at Mitt Romney, say, ‘Haha. Not authentic.’ I mean, it is just so obvious. I mean, you know this is a guy who’s running against everything he’s believed his whole life. And it’s just so staggeringly [obvious].”

Not inclined to believe in miracles around here, but looking at this line-up it's miraculous there wasn't an implosion & sudden formation of a black hole when the dense centrist matter these Beltway hacks (Your host: Morning Joe "Brought to You by Starbucks" Scarborough, & TontaMika Brzezinski, Jon Meacham, Harold Ford, Jr., the aforementioned Mustache &, icing on the cake because we all need more empty calories, David Effing Brooks.) spew for a living collided over the Meet the Press roundtable.Any "organized left" in these United Snakes would have stormed the studio w/ suicide troops & blown it all to the center of the sun.

It's a Judeo-Christian nation: You just live in it. Not, however, a Shariah law nation, but a Halachic law nation, which of course is not un-Constitutional or anything. Where's the outrage over the impending Halachic law take-over?

A long-standing culture of non-cooperation with secular justice by Brooklyn's ultra-Orthodox Jews keeps many child sex offenders out of the courts and at large in their communities.

[...]

Brooklyn's Jewish communities, home to the largest number of ultra-Orthodox Jews outside Israel, are insular and close-knit. They maintain their own shadow justice system based on religious halachic law, enforced by religious courts known as the beit din. In recent years, they have also established their own community police force, the Shomrim.

Like the Catholic bishops before them, the ultra-Orthodox rabbis who lead these communities are charged with the concealment of crimes stretching back decades, and of fostering a culture where witnesses are silenced through intimidation.

Jesus, have the little children not yet suffered enough at the hands of sick old men?

Yehuda Kolko was indicted for molesting two boys – but in a plea deal
was given a probationary sentence for child endangerment.
Photograph: New York Daily News/Getty Images

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Perhaps most remarkable of all, not only is it now plausible, in a scientific sense, that our universe came from nothing, if we ask what properties a universe created from nothing would have, it appears that these properties resemble precisely the universe we live in.

The study by the California Assn. of Scholars repeats objections conservatives have had for decades over what they see as an overwhelmingly liberal academia that stifles dissent. Especially in UC humanities departments, study of classics and rigorous analysis have been replaced by advocacy of a leftist agenda and teaching about the grievances of various minorities, the report says.

"It has reached an extreme where one couldn't not comment," John Ellis, a UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus in German literature and president of the association, said in explaining why his group is releasing the document now.

[...]

Robert Anderson, a UC Berkeley economics and math professor who is chairman of the systemwide faculty Senate, said the report "is short on facts, but long on innuendo and anecdotes. The University of California offers tens of thousands of courses each year, the vast majority of which are excellent. A few dozen anecdotes about courses that allegedly have significant flaws does not diminish that fact, much less support the report's sweeping claims."

We'd make a funny about how it read in the original German, but it's probably true. See also: God and Man At Yale, published in 1951 f'r Chrissake & just as irrelevant today as then. Where's the socialist paradise we were promised? Even w/ that boyman in the White House we're no closer to (arguably farther from) utopia than we were 60+ yrs. ago. So why not shut the fuck up, scholars? ("Scholars." How medieval.)

OK. Almost five yrs. of this, have not made a million dollars (Indeed, have lost money on the deal, what w/ pathetic appeals for money from web-logging losers nation-wide & our sympathetic heart.) & now that we've removed comment verification we receive more Russki spam than comments.

Friday, March 30, 2012

WASHINGTON -- Ryan Miner remembers watching a fat piece of sausage splatter with a thud against a picture of Sen. Rick Santorum adorning the side of the senator’s campaign RV.

It was fall 2006, and Miner, then a Santorum intern, was helping feed a group of Pittsburgh Steelers fans tailgating outside of Heinz Field. But it was a tough sell -- especially because the Santorum volunteers were peddling snacks and campaign literature to rowdy, buzzed hordes. The crowd eventually turned on the volunteers, and a weapon of choice was Polish.

"Fuck you, Rick Santorum!" Miner recalls the sausage-tosser shouting.

In short order, the tailgaters assailed the Santorum volunteers with whatever they could get their hands on: sausage, cookies, half-empty cups of beer, and beer cans.

"For the most part it was pretty unpleasant," recalls Bryan Nagy, who had joined his friend Miner for the event so he could get some free food. "A lot of booing. Some people would spit in the general direction of the bus."

The event was supposed to build camaraderie and sell Santorum as a beloved member of Steeler Nation. Yet, like much of that brutal 2006 campaign that ended Santorum's Senate career, it simply reinforced the impression that Santorum -- whom the electorate had come to regard as sanctimonious and out-of-touch -- played for the away team.

In "reaching for his waistband" events, in Pasadena if you make a bullshit 911 call, you will be arrested.

Police say a videotape from that night shows a 17-year-old suspect burglarizing the car while McDade acted as a lookout, the Star-News reports. The other suspect has been charged with grand theft, commercial burglary and failure to register as a gang member as a condition of probation.

But neither suspect was armed, and Carrillo later admitted that he lied in order to get a faster police response. He is being arrested on the theory that his false report led police to believe that McDade was armed and ultimately to the fatal shooting. Two police—one in a patrol car and the other on the ground—fired at McDade when they saw him reaching for his waistband. Officials say the officers believed he was reaching for a gun.

The District Attorney's office is reviewing the case as it does with all deadly officer-related shootings, and McDade's family and the ACLU is asking for an independent review into the case, according to the Times.

The bloodthirsty needn't worry; they've picked up where they left off in 2010.

Japan hangs 3 in 1st executions since 2010

By ERIC TALMADGE, Associated Press – 1 hour ago

TOKYO (AP) — Three death row inmates in Japan were executed by hanging on Thursday, the country's first executions in more than a year and a half.

The men were reportedly hanged in three different prisons. One was convicted of ramming a car into a train station and then knifing people nearby, killing five, in 1999. The second killed two people in 2001 and the third killed three in 2002.

Justice Minister Toshio Ogawa confirmed the executions in a news conference, saying that the punishment is supported by the public. He did not provide details, and all major Japanese media quoted anonymous Justice Ministry officials for details on who was executed.

The executions were Japan's first since July 2010. Capital punishment is usually ordered only for inmates convicted of multiple murders. Japan has 132 death row convicts, which is near its highest level since World War II.

Japan, along with the United States, is one of the few industrialized countries that still has capital punishment. All executions in Japan are carried out by hanging. Inmates on death row do not know when they will be executed until the last minute, while family members and lawyers are only told afterward.

The lack of transparency in the system has been criticized by rights groups such as Amnesty International and the main Japanese bar association. But capital punishment is generally supported by the public, according to opinion polls.

Public broadcaster NHK said 2011 was the first full year without any executions in 19 years.

Come the revolution most surviving reactionaries will simply be shot, we suppose, but a few will be shot into space, possibly w/o the assistance of a spacecraft. Jeff "Amazon Warehouse" Bezos is one of the latter.

NASA is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire five-year-olds. It sure inspired me, and with this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore.

We'll keep you posted.

Sincerely,

Jeff Bezos

It might also be appropriate to push Mr. Bezos out of that Cameron guy's fucking submarine, several miles below the surface & along w/ Cameron, of course.

A Salon headline writer tops an item about the passing of another political fad thus:

The Times asks why the libertarian candidate turned out to be less beloved than the Internet made him seem

Not that we've given enough of a shit to bother bothering outsider/oldster "Dr." Ron Paul this go-round, but today's Internet Paultards didn't seem nearly as interested in showing up whenever the sad old toad was mentioned as they were last election cycle.

Hey, not to forget those extra-exceptional extra-judicial executions! Lessee ... one for the Neighborhood Watch, 17 for Afghanistan Watch (Powered by the US Army!) & who can count in the amateur ranks.

I'm a writer. But there are zillions of writers. Here's some of my stuff.

Meatspace acquaintance "Brick" Wahl, jazz happenings compiler for the L.A. Weekly until he told them where to put their silly job, has acquired a domain name & everything, just as if it were 200X, & (despite prior protests & promises never to) jumped into web logging.

Looks as if this obese gentleman, if not his family, hasn't exactly been starving lately. You don't suppose he's asked Americans for Prosperity about creating a job for him, do you? Maybe a high-paying job sewing AFP T-shirts somewhere in the Third World?

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

As usual, the lame-ass & pathetic media is days behind Just Another Blog (From L.A.)™ (& the Guardian) in covering the grifting & other criminal activity that (allegedly) goes on behind (doubtless gilded) First Amendment doors at the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Right Wing Watch looked at & linked to the entire complaint.

Friday, March 23, 2012

At BTC News, Weldon Berger, who writes (rather than, say, types outlines for the Internet equivalent of a tedious Morning Zoo radio dealexcept it's on satellite/pay-radio so "fuck," if not fucking, is allowed) reviews David Corn's new, just-in-time-for-the-election review of the Obama admin., Showdown. Or uses it as an opening to rake them over some coals.

Meanwhile, over at the War Department, plans were well underway to dramatically escalate a war in Afghanistan that at least some of the president’s advisers must have known to be doomed, and that had never for a moment resembled the description of it he offered to the tuxedoed and gowned Nobel crowd.

None of this is surprising in the least. Sickening, sure. Although, on the bright side, once the Ryan budget is passed & the American people again have the freedom to die in the street after Social Security & Medicare are phased out, donations to these looting, mooching parasites may dry up.

Are you fucking kidding us?

McVeigh's lawsuit makes the most damning allegations, claiming "unlawful and unreported income distributions to Trinity Broadcasting's directors" with "multiple jet aircraft, including a $50m Global Express luxury jet aircraft purchased for the personal use of the Crouches through a sham loan … as well as an $8m Hawker jet aircraft purchased by Trinity Broadcasting for the personal use of director Janice Crouch".

It also describes the purchase of "multiple motor vehicles, including a $100,000 motor home purchased by Trinity Broadcasting as a mobile residence for director Janice Crouch's dogs".

Directors of the network are also accused of misusing funds to cover up sex scandals, including the alleged "cover-up and destruction of evidence concerning a bloody sexual assault involving Trinity Broadcasting and affiliated Holy Land Experience employees; the cover-up of director Janice Crouch's affair with a staff member at the Holy Land Experience; the cover-up of director Paul Crouch's use of Trinity Broadcasting funds to pay for a legal settlement with Enoch Lonnie Ford (a former TBN employee who said he had a homosexual affair with [founder] Paul Crouch)".*

Brittany Koper, the network's former finance director, claims she was fired after she discovered the extent of the financial wrongdoing.

Her lawsuit follows one by the church against her – later dismissed – which alleged that Koper and her husband used forged documents to embezzle funds to buy cars, jewellery and a fishing boat.

"She blew the whistle and got terminated," Koper's lawyer, Tymothy MacLeod, told the Los Angeles Times. "Brittany has done the right thing. It's admirable that someone on the inside of TBN has come forward and is revealing to the world exactly what is going on behind those closed doors."

The network's lawyer has denied allegations accusing McVeigh and the Kopers of working together to steal from the ministry. He said the Crouches travel by private jet because they have had "scores of death threats, more than the president of the United States".

One can only hope.*Odd they can afford US$100,000.00 for a canine mobile home but can't afford to defend the married-to-a-drag-queen founder of their scam from such heinous charges. It's almost as if they were trying to hide something.

This had no invitation to visit stuff likepicking-up-a-nude-model-for-your-next-shoot/]artificialintelligenceseo.info/2012/02 [As fucking if! — M.B.]
We'll therefore assume it's absolutely sincere.I recently came across your article and have been reading along. I want to express my admiration of your writing skill and ability to make readers read from the beginning to the end. I would like to read newer posts and to share my thoughts with you .
So, dear reader, did you reach the end?

Younger &/or foreigner-than-we people who aren't fully hepped to America's Funny Guys, The Firesign Theatre, might use this as an intro to their oeuvre. Memory no longer serves, but we don't think any of the cuts are over five mins.That said, their long-form (Entire albums, both sides, could be as much as 50 mins.) works are pretty dense & may require more or longer-term attention.

These legislators are pushovers for campaign contributors. What’s a pittance for a super PAC can buy a state senator, beginning with financing a campaign and continuing support into the statehouse. These campaigns to take over state governments will grow as business sees the possibilities.

Think about what’s happening with abortion, contraception, voters’ rights and immigration. Do you want these people in charge of medical care for the poor?

Say, we hear he's in town to appear on Bill Maher's show Friday. Wonder if we could get off our ass, drag it over to Television City & punch him in his stupidly blind nose. No jury, &c. Yeah, it's a threat, if not a promise.

Or maybe we can have him deported for enraging a decent American. Or enraging us.

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Three white men, including a teenager who pleaded guilty to murder and hate crime charges in Mississippi state court for running over a black man with his truck, have been charged with federal hate crimes.

Two people with direct knowledge of the case told The Associated Press on Thursday that John Aaron Rice, Dylan Butler and Deryl Dedmon were charged in documents sealed in U.S. District Court in Jackson. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the charges had not been unsealed.

The U.S. Justice Department has called a news conference for Thursday afternoon. A statement says it will focus on a hate crime case.

The 19-year-old Dedmon received two life sentences on state charges Wednesday for the June 2011 death of 47-year-old James Craig Anderson.

Monckton, the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, hinted about his position on the issue in April 2010 at a tea party rally on the National Mall near the White House. But on Miller’s show, he said the birth certificate issue was far more important that combatting so-called anthropogenic global warming.

“I mean, hey you got a president who has a false birth certificate on the Internet, on the White House website,” Monckton said. “It’s not even clear where he was born. You’ve got a
national debt which is rising into the stratosphere. You’ve got unemployment certainly here in California at 11 percent, 50 percent in the construction industry. These are real problems. You’ve got real environmental problems — overfishing, deforestation, pollution, not so much in the west but certainly in other countries. These are real problems which ought to be addressed. You’ve got poverty. You’ve got disease. These are again serious problems in Africa for instance, that we could be helping with. But no, we’re obsessed with making the rich even richer and making the absolute bankers richer still by going for global warming and cap-and-trade and other nonsenses of this kind.”

Really? He's worried that bankers will get richer? Not bloody likely. (That he's worried, not that bankers won't continue to rob us blind.)Nor do we need Dennis Miller, either.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has begun calling for criminal penalties for citizens who visit web sites that advocate for terror or hate. "From now on, any person who habitually consults Web sites that advocate terrorism or that call for hatred and violence will be criminally punished," Sarkozy was reported as saying.

Because we will not back away from our calls for terror & violence against our oppressors!

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said Wednesday that he is “deeply concerned” that the leadership of the Catholic Church has “negotiated themselves a space of operation” in Cuba “in exchange for looking the other way,” and expressed concern that Pope Benedict XVI’s upcoming trip to the island may “reinforce that arrangement.”

Rubio, a Catholic, said during a discussion at The Heritage Foundation that the Catholic Church has “negotiated a political space for themselves in exchange for their moral imperative.”

Volunteering an example, Rubio said, “last week… the church invited — the cardinal invited — Castro thugs to come into the church and remove people.”

Rubio also denounced the church for “actively participating in exiling dissidents,” sarcastically adding, “somehow exiling someone to Spain is a humanitarian measure.” (SEE ALSO: Marco Rubio was a Mormon once)

During the event, Rubio discussed Cuban oil exploration and expressed concern that the Communist government may in the future find a new source of revenue in oil exports. He said that a greater concern, however, is the potentially devastating effect of a Cuban oil spill on his state’s environment.

Will not be arsed to see what Sen. Rubio's position on BP oil spills might be, but why would one expect him to be any less hypocritical? Speaking of, from the Wiki:

Rubio attends Catholic Mass as well as a Southern Baptist church in West Kendall, Florida.[34][9][35].

Authorities say seven white teens were partying in the early morning hours on June 26, 2011, when Dedmon suggested they find a black man to harass. Police say Anderson was beaten before Dedmon ran him down before dawn.

Another teenager, John Aaron Rice, is charged with simple assault in the case. Authorities said he left the scene before Anderson was killed.

The FBI also investigated the case.

The case received widespread attention after a video of Anderson's death was obtained by news organizations, including The Associated Press.

The video, taken by a hotel surveillance camera, shows a white Jeep Cherokee in which Rice was allegedly a passenger leaving a hotel parking lot at 5:05 a.m. Less than 20 seconds later, a Ford truck backs up and then lunges forward. Anderson's shirt is illuminated in the headlights before he disappears under the vehicle next to the curb. Police say Dedmon was driving the truck and later bragged that he ran over Anderson, using a racial slur to describe him.

Reading the original mid-2007 Boston Globe story, it seems clear that one of the sources was Romney's eldest son, Tagg. The anecdote presumably was proffered as an amusing childhood reminiscence (Tagg was 13 in 1983) to portray Romney's approach to raising five rambunctious sons. There was probably a secondary motivation as well—to illustrate Romney's love for his wife, Ann. While Seamus and the Romney sons were allowed to go to the bathroom only when the Chevrolet station wagon (nicknamed the "white whale") needed gas, Ann Romney could halt the journey at will. As Tagg put it, "As soon as my mom says, 'I think I need to go to the bathroom,' he pulls over instantly, and doesn't complain. 'Anything for you, Ann.'"

[...]

What gives the Seamus story legs (four) is the inadvertent glimpse it offers of Romney's rigidity. For all the natural parental annoyance with the constant are-we-there-yet demands and the bodily needs of five boys on the trek to Canada, it is a rare father who would so zealously limit bathroom and food stops. Remember: The Romneys were not exactly desperate refugees racing to get across the Canadian border before they were stopped by the authorities. They were an affluent American family on vacation, but with all the spontaneous joy of an automotive assembly line. Seamus was collateral damage. What matters is the suck-it-up discipline that Mitt Romney tried to impose on his family.

People are not cyborgs—they have human needs, including a propensity for rest stops and, in politics, healthy egos. But an awareness of these personal factors does not seem to be part of the Romney repertoire. "The Real Romney" by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, pointedly notes, "He is not fed by and does not crave, casual social interaction, often displaying little desire to know who people are and what makes them tick."

Although Romney's aloof style has different roots than Barack Obama's cerebral detachment, the similarity suggests that we may be headed for a presidential year when both candidates view voters primarily as abstractions. After covering the 2008 campaign, I regretted that I missed an important clue about Obama's loner personality that was hiding in plain sight on the opening page of his autobiography, "Dreams from My Father." Describing his time as an undergraduate at Columbia University, Obama writes, "I was impatient in those days, busy with work and unrealized plans, and prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions." Unlike virtually every other man who has run for the White House in modern history, Mitt Romney undoubtedly would understand what the youthful Obama meant.

Because a Columbia undergraduate will remain exactly the same person forever. ("Obama writes, 'I was impatient in those days ...'") Mittens, meanwhile, has kept that stick firmly lodged up there since forever.

Well, yesterday was a pretty crummy effort. No indication today will be any better, either, although we expect to hit 600,000 visits (Per sitemeter, at least, & of which no more than 100,000 are from ourself.) sometime today. Thanks, sickening perverts & weirdos w/ your disgusting searches for our innocent material & images.

... who hasn't wanted to melt the fuck down?There is no more privacy. Ten yrs. ago this would have been grainy b&w footage from the dashboard of a police car* if it existed at all, & it wasn't available for jerks like us to run gleefully. Now there's coverage from every civilian in the area.

Previously on TMZ.Also: Doesn't count if you don't run in traffic. Still on the sidewalk, still in command of your faculties.*Not to forget George Holliday, who recorded Rodney King being beaten by police in 1991 (Twentieth anniv. of the riots any month now.) but video cameras weren't in everybody's damn cellPad in those simpler times.

The last few months, however, have brought news from abroad suggesting that in many places, punk's combination of splenetic dissent, loud guitars and outre attire can cause as much disquiet and outrage as ever. The stories concerned take in Indonesia, Burma, Iraq and Russia – and most highlight one big difference between the hoo-hah kicked up by punk in the US and Britain of the late 70s, and the reactions it now stirs thousands of miles from its places of birth. Back then, being a punk rocker might invite occasional attacks in the street, a ban on your records, and the odd difficulty finding somewhere to play. Now, if you pursue a love of punk in the wrong political circumstances, you may well experience oppression at its most brutal: torture, imprisonment, what one regime calls "moral rehabilitation" and even death.

These exceptional United Snakes, personified by a victim at home (Trayvon Martin) & a killer abroad (Robert Bales).If you fucking Yankee sheep haven't figured it out, you're already in a concentration camp, a disproportionate percentage of the planet's crazy people having been concentrated here.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

If you imagined we've been on a St. Patrick's Day binge & haven't been interested in the Internet (or anything beyond the next drunken cliché) you'd be absolutely correct, & as usual you don't get a damn thing for being so.

Anyway, once we'd sobered up (Just kidding! Still drunk as two coots.) we noticed an e-mail from one Weird Dave (could be his real name) who had (& may still have) doubts that the comments were working correctly.

Gave it the old college try (That's funny. We're only one or two behind Sarah Palin in schools attended.) even going so far as to fire up Idiot Exploder 9.0.8112. 16421 64-bit Edition to try a couple of comments while not signed in to Bugger™. Worked for us.

We're inclined to blame Google. Why not? And, Blogger having apparently remedied the evil done w/ the new pastel gradualism design for full page comments, we're reverted. If there's any one (Anyone?) else out there who has noted any problems, well, don't blame us.

“I’m offering out a whole range of issues, from brain science to paying off the national debt to creating American energy programs so no American president ever again bows to a Saudi king to rethinking Social Security so young people can have a personal Social Security savings account,” added Gingrich. “You know, I think it’s important to have a Republican Party committed to big ideas. And unfortunately, I think much of this campaign has been driven by super PACs committed to negative tiny ideas and I don’t think that’s the way to govern the country or solve our problems.”

Why did she stick with homeschooling for so long, despite her difficulties? “We were convinced that it would be better for our kids not to have an education than to be educated to become humanists or atheists and to reject God,” Garrison says. “We became so isolated because the Quiverfull lifestyle was so overwhelming we didn’t have time or energy for socialization. So the only people we knew were exactly like us. We were told that the whole point of public school was to dumb down the children and turn them into compliant workers – to brainwash them and indoctrinate them into this godless way of thinking.”

Garrison believes that homeschooling has become so popular with fundamentalist Christians because, “there is an atmosphere of real terror among some evangelicals. They are horrified by the fact that Obama is president, and they see the New Atheist movement as a vocal, in-your-face threat. Plus, they are obsessed with the End Times, and believe that the Apocalypse could happen any day now...They see a demon on every corner.

“We homeschooled because we wanted to protect our children from what we viewed as the total secularization of America. We listened to people like Rush Limbaugh, who told us that America was in the clutches of evil liberal feminist atheists.”

And how do the public schools dumb the children down?

I don’t merely mean that they had received what I now view as an overly politicized education with huge gaps, for example, in American history, evolution or sexuality. Rather, what disturbed me were the many stories about homeschoolers who were barely literate when they graduated, or whose math and science education had never extended much past middle school.

Take Vyckie Garrison, an ex-Quiverfull mother of seven who, in 2008, enrolled her six school-age children in public school after 18 years of teaching them at home. Garrison, who started the No Longer Quivering blog, says her near-constant pregnancies – which tended to result either in miscarriages or life-threatening deliveries – took a toll on her body and depleted her energy. She wasn’t able to devote enough time and energy to homeschooling to ensure a quality education for each child.*

[...]

At the time, Garrison was taking parenting advice from Quiverfull leaders who deemphasized academic achievement in favor of family values. She remembers one Quiverfull leader saying, “If they can do mathematics perfectly but they have no morals, you have failed them.”

The implication, she says, was that, “if they’re not doing so well academically, well, then they can catch up on that later. It’s not such a big deal. It was a really convenient way of thinking for me because I wasn’t able to keep up anyway.”

No, wait, that's how home schooling dumbs 'em down.*War on Women (& Children)? How could you ever think such a thing?

Follow straight to Hell!

E-Z 4 U

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